


Welcome to the Murder Hut

by William_Easley



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Family, Ghosts, History, Humor, Lumberjacks, Mystery Shack, Scams, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:15:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25785739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley
Summary: In the winter of 1981-82, a horrified Stanley Pines saw his brother pulled through a portal and into unknown dimensions. Determined to find Stanford and rescue him, to make things right, Stanley needs money. And a place to stay. And the perfect scam. So begins the tale of how the Mystery Shack was born.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	1. The Plan

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own the show Gravity Falls or any of the characters. They are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of the show's creator, Alex Hirsch. I earn no money from writing my fanfictions; I do them out of love for the show, for practice writing, and to amuse myself and, I hope, other readers.

* * *

**Welcome to the Murder Hut**

**By William Easley**

_(March-June 1982)_

**1-The Plan**

When Fiddleford, just recovering from being sucked into Stanford's newly-completed transuniversal polydimensional metavortex, otherwise known as the Portal, lay semi-conscious and twitching on the laboratory floor, Ford frantically asked his stunned friend what he had seen while his head was thrust into an unknown dimension.

Unfortunately, Fiddleford's shouted reply, "YROO XRKSVI GIRZMTOV," made no sense at all. Many years later, after a bout of madness and a slow return, Fiddleford wrote out the phrase. With his great-nephew's help, Ford finally managed a translation: "Triangle cipher Bill."

"I wouldn't have understood it anyway," Ford murmured, shaking his head over the cryptogram's solution. "At that time, I regarded Bill Cipher, the triangle, as my muse. Poor Fiddleford. I treated him badly."

Sadly, Fiddleford's short venture into the Nightmare Realm had pushed him over the edge of madness. After he walked out on Ford, for two weeks he had trouble speaking—he tended to say his sentences backward, like "Thing right the did I reckon I." He also could not remember whether it was stop on green, go on red, or the reverse. Slowly he got over that, but his memories tormented him into using the memory eraser on himself—too much—and into founding the Society of the Blind Eye.

Fiddleford's sudden resignation also had resulted in Ford's calling on his long-lost twin, Stanley, to come to Gravity Falls to help out. And _that_ resulted in Stanley's accidentally activating the Portal, and _that_ meant Stanford got pulled through the Portal into the Nightmare Realm, and _that_ meant Stanley would spend thirty years trying to retrieve him.

Life. It's one damned thing after another, as Dante remarked on seeing a demon hungrily chasing an imp around the Fifth Circle.

However.

In the late winter (in Oregon, that's about a week after the spring solstice) of 1982, Stanley Pines exhausted all the food in his missing brother's house. The beer had been the first to go. For some reason, Stanford also stored case upon case of something called "The Brown Meat." It came in cans wrapped in brown paper, with no manufacturer, price, or detailed nutritional information on it, just the label "Brown Meat" and in small letters "Complete survival nutrients."

It looked like dog food, but the stuff was edible for someone who could control his gag reflex. Anyway, with many, many cases of the stuff, each case containing twenty-four cans, each serving capable of providing two thousand calories and one full day's worth of basic nutrition for a full-grown man, that eventually had become Stanley's only food.

At first there was bread, and butter, eggs and bacon, ketchup and mustard, more cans of Baron Numnum's High Flying Beans, half of half a gallon of orange juice, coffee, canned condensed milk, tinned tuna, salmon, and sardines, all the yummy stuff a guy could choke down. All of that dwindled, but for weeks he thought he'd have to eat brown meat for years to come.

By May, it was clear that he was out of every foodstuff except Brown Meat. The monotony was driving him crazy. Already Stanley was desperately trying to figure out how to repair the Portal and, he hoped, to bring his lost brother home. That was when he ventured to a convenience store for supplies—at least a loaf of bread—only to discover his bankroll had shrunk to pocket lint and a Colombian peso. He suspected that the lint would be valued slightly above the peso. It was too late to shoplift—he stood at the register already when he realized that the last tank of gas had emptied his wallet.

But then the old guy who ran the Dusk2Dawn store wondered what kind of shenanigans the reclusive scientist—everyone had mistaken Stanley for his PhD brother Stanford—got up to in that mysterious log house. And someone asked if he gave tours, and impulsively, Stanley had announced that tours were available at fifteen dollars per person.

And people shoved money at him.

Hungry as he was, Stanley took the cash, led the townies out to Ford's house, about a mile out of town, and improvised a tour that—surprise—proved popular. Eventually, the mayor of Gravity Falls bumbled through and suggested, "You know, this town could use a tourist attraction, but I can't eat butter or lard anymore."

Paying attention to only the first part of the mayor's statement, Stan sat down one morning in late May and took stock. To date, between fifty and sixty chumps from town had paid to go through the fifteen-dollar tour of the house. That had brought in something over seven hundred bucks, but—

The mail came every day. Some of it was magazines with titles like _Quantum Notes, Fringe Physics Quarterly, The Contrarian,_ and _Journal of Cryptozoology_ , none of which had centerfolds. Some of it was catalogs— _Modern_ _Laboratory Supplies, Beyond Borders Paranormal Equipment,_ and _L.L. Heisenberg Outfitters_ ("We May or May Not Be the Best") _._

Surprisingly little mail consisted of bills. The electricity seemed to come from a large metallic cube down in Stanford's basement lab, from which a thick cable ran to the fuse box. The heat came from a fireplace and a huge stack of wood out back. The water seemed to come from a deep well with its own pump, presumably powered by the mysterious cube. Ford's telephone had a green button labeled "OFF TEL GRID," and since he pushed it every time he got or made a call, the phone evidently bypassed the telephone company. The garbage he hauled to the dump himself. In short, utilities didn't cost him a thing, or if it did, no one sent a bill.

Except the Northwest National Bank wanted its mortgage payments. The mortgage was two hundred fifty a month—and Stan began paying after one was overdue and was still two months behind when June began. Though Stan lived cheap, after the $250 per month bite he didn't clear much above bare subsistence. The obvious answer was to take Mayor Befufflefumpter's advice and create a tourist trap. That meant exhibits. And tours, at fifteen dollars for adults and ten for kids. And—

When the idea came to him, Stan would have sworn that a chorus of angels was singing an uplifting chord in his ear, the lyrics being—

_And merchandising!_

Now, Stanley had spent ten years as a failed salesman and entrepreneur. He'd been a failure in thirty-odd states and four Central and South American countries. If "failure" had been a college course, Stanley would have aced it. He could easily have won his PFD degree. Right! Tours, exhibits, and merchandising! For the first time in his life, Stanley felt he had hit the right plan to get rich—and quick.

However, to obtain merch, he needed capital. So the first thing was to come up with a backstory fit for a tourist trap. Maybe the house had been built on an Indian graveyard. Nah, too corny. Or possibly the original builder of the house had committed suicide, and his ghost still walked. But then Stan met Dan Corduroy, who casually asked how the house was holding up. Stan said it was fine. Dan beamed and said he must have done a good job, and that was when Stan learned the big lumberjack had built the house single-handed, and he looked so full of life that no one would believe he'd committed suicide nearly a decade ago. In fact, Stan felt Manly Dan would probably still be chopping trees someday two months after he died.

But the ghost idea.

Oh, yeah. Make up a good story. Someone was murdered in the house. And his ghost still haunted the place. Maybe it lived in that upstairs closet from which weird noises kept coming, day and night alike.

Pencil in hand and ruled tablet on the table ahead of him, Stanley wrote, "The lonely house on the outskirts of Gravity Falls, Oregon, has been called the most haunted log cabin in central Oregon. Disembodied spookums lurk in every corner! Visitors have the feeling that just behind them looms someone, or some THING, a being from the Dimension of the Departed.

For in fact more than fifty restless spirits have passed this way. And the ghosts are led by the spirit of an angry man who, many years ago, was brutally murdered at the very spot where the house now stands. That's why people from all across America speak in hushed tones of . . . the Murder House!"

He read the paragraph over and struck through the last two words, replacing them with "Murder Hut!"

A few days later, in the barber shop (he had a mullet he wanted to get rid of), Old Man McSweeney said, "Ain't seen you in here in a long time, Doc Pines."

"Uh, no, been real busy with my science stuff, ya know."

"You better take it easy. You're soundin' a little hoarse."

"Allergies, I guess."

"All righty, sir, what do we want today? Go back to your regular hairstyle?"

"Yes, please," Stan said.

"You might want to pick up some throat lozenges. Those allergies are making you sound right rough." McSweeney must have been close to ninety. He didn't use electric clippers, just comb and scissors and—Stan blanched a little because the old man's hands trembled—an old-fashioned straight razor. "You might want to see the doctor, too. Like I told you years back, that cabin of yours is built on unhealthy ground, yessir."

Doing his impression of Ford, Stan said, "Indeed? I've forgotten. You know, absent-minded scientist and all. Why is it unhealthy?"

"Well, sir, it goes back to the big flood of, let's see, my old grandpa told me. Um. Of 1870, I think it was. Two solid weeks of drenching rain, and the river come plumb over its banks and flooded downtown, and then the old Sumpqua dam busted up the mountain, where the log flume used to be, and the flood from that washed all the dead bodies out of the potters' field—shoulda called it the loggers' field, Grandpa said—and re-buried them, all stacked up and higgledy-piggledy, about where your house stands now. Buried 'em under ten feet of silt and mud, and nobody ever dug 'em up and gave 'em a decent burial. Surprised you ain't haunted out there."

"Keep talking," Stan urged, still doing his Ford impression. "I find all this frightfully interesting."

"Well, sir, close to a hundred lumberjacks drowned in the great mudslide of 1863, and their bodies were hauled off to this big clearing they'd made in choppin' lumber for the Northwest mansion up on the hill. Northwest hired some men, and they just dug a great big mass grave and dumped 'em in and covered 'em. So when the flood of '70 hit, it swept up mud and bodies and all and re-buried 'em just about where your house is, like I say. That's why old man Northwest tried for years to get somebody to buy that parcel. Folks around here thought it might be haunted, or unhealthy."

"Fascinating," Stan said, but then he had to hold very still because the straight razor was scraping his sideburns even and then working on the back of his neck.

The very next time he went to the dump with two weeks of garbage in the trunk of his El Diablo, Stan scavenged some perfectly good plywood scraps and a few slightly crooked planks.

He spent a day laboriously sawing the plywood into the right size, then painting it—yellow background because that stands out, red lettering because that looked vaguely like blood—and then he climbed up on the roof and put up the sign: THE MURDER HUT. On impulse, and because he had some red paint handy, he added some question marks.

He had learned that lots of tourists traveled south on the highway that led past Gravity Falls Valley. He added smaller signs there, one every quarter of a mile, so that motorists heading for, say, Crater Lake would spot them and read them in order:

* * *

_If your family wants cheap thrills,_

_Keep your eyes peeled in these hills—_

_You'll find spooks and freaks and more_

_And the world's best keepsake store_

_If you see ghosts, you're not off your nut—_

_You're just visiting the Murder Hut!_

_Watch for turn 3 miles ahead!_

* * *

Stan scratched up some cash by selling Ford's car—a 1979 Lincoln in great condition—and brought the mortgage payments up to date. Then he set about finding attractions.

He had read through some of the back issues of Ford's cryptozoology magazine. He had heard Manly Dan talk of the Hide-Behind. He'd bought a few motheaten taxidermy fakes (Bigfoot, a mannequin in a gorilla suit, a Jackalope, a jack rabbit with antlers grafted on its stuffed head, and a preserved mermaid, a fish's butt sewn onto a monkey's torso).

He added jockey shorts for the Bigfoot, since the suit actually had no male or female equipment in that zone, and with a fit of inspiration called it the Sascrotch. With considerable effort, he hauled a fossilized dinosaur skull from Ford's bedroom to the museum area and put a label over it: "Proof Dragons Are for Real?" Trick photographs on the walls rounded out the modest display: He'd used the articulated skeleton's detached arm and an axe and double exposures to take a picture of skeletal arms jutting from the ground and clutching axes ("The Haunted Lumberjack Burial Ground"), bought prints of a gigantic grasshopper superimposed on a full-sized wagon of corn ("They Grow 'Em Big in Oregon"), and cut and pasted a photo of a racehorse riding another horse, then re-photographed it ("It's Just So Wrong!").

It was a beginning for the Museum of Mysteries.

He had also discovered a mail-order company operating out of Eerie, Indiana, called TTS, Inc. (that stood for Tourist Trap Scams) and had ordered a buttload of cheap, easily-marked-up knickknacks, doohickeys, and tchotchkes—Whimmy Doodles and Climbing Monkeys, kids' magic kits, Tarot cards, Magic Eight Balls, knock-off Ouija Boards ("Whee, Yeah Boards") and what have you. Add to that coffee cups with question marks, ballpoint pens with WHAT IS THE MURDER HUT? printed on the barrels—yeah, baby, merchandise!

Not everything for sale was, strictly speaking, fake. Stan cleaned out a storage closet Ford had jam-packed with small fossils of fish and crinoids, insects in amber, crystal globes and geodes, and voila! He had stocked the former living room, which became the gift shop. A second-hand cash register, an automaton he bought cheap at a yard sale (a coin-operated mechanical prospector panning for gold), and he was ready to fleece the marks.

On the last day of May, Stanley set the Grand Opening of the Murder Hut for June 18.

But since he had put up the roadside signs, he was giving somewhat limited regular tours every day already—fifteen bucks a head for adults, ten for kids from six to twelve, little ones free, or if the family was larger than two adults and two kids but no more than ten individuals altogether, everybody for only forty dollars.

Heck, he made more than eight hundred dollars the week before the Grand Opening.

"Oh, yeah," Stan said, grinning on the morning of June 18. "Now we're cookin'!"

* * *


	2. The Snags

**Welcome to the Murder Hut**

_(June-August 1982)_

**2-The Snags**

Later during his thirty-year stay in Gravity Falls, Stanley Pines often looked back to the summer of 1982 as the time when he was happiest. He had many reasons.

First, for that interval, he was the town darling. Gravity Falls was an insular town, the only large settlement in its strangely circular valley. It was also a small town, and he was a new face in a sea of familiarity.

Convinced that the reclusive Stanford Pines had at last emerged from his self-imposed isolation, charmed by Stan's pitchman's gift of gab, amused by his corny jokes, believing in many of his tall tales, they welcomed him. He learned that the town had a small chapter of his father's old lodge, the brotherhood of the Holy Mackerel. He turned up at one of their meetings in their lodge hall on the far side of town and asked if he might be eligible for membership.

Scrawny pharmacist Arnold Habply was the president of the chapter that year. When Stan asked to adjoin, Habply asked two questions: "Why do you want to be a member?" and "Do you have fifty bucks?"

"Well," Stanley said, "first, back in my home town in New Jersey, my dad's a loyal Mackerel. I've seen how the activities of the lodge have made life richer, fuller, and better for him and for the community, and I want to be a part of it. Second, yeah, I got the first year's dues here, in cash, small unmarked bills. You didn't ask, but third, I got the hat."

He donned Filbrick Pines's old fez—after accidentally taking it one evening when Filbrick had drunk too much, he had kept it all these years—and said, "Eh? Eh?"

"I like a man who comes prepared. You're in," Habply said.

You take a formerly outgoing, boisterous friendly guy and set him a-roving on his own for ten long years, and he feels a strange emotion when once again he finds a group to belong to. It might be called joy. Anyway, it gave Stanley only a minimum of heartburn.

Patrick "Everybody calls me Pa" Duskerton was a senior Mackerel, and he became a poker buddy. His wife Martha "Everybody calls me Ma" even tried a couple of times to set Stanley up with a lady, though none of them really clicked.

That summer the Friday evenings at the lodge hall were fun times, and moderately profitable, too. Stan's time on the road had taught him to be a good judge of people. He could tell when a guy trying to look all cool and confident was squirming inwardly because, doggone it, he held a hand consisting of the trey, seven, nine, and Jack of hearts. And then there was that lousy Ace of spades lousing up a nice little flush in hearts. Part of Stan's good judgment also came from some lessons from a professional gambler in card sense and reading his opponents' poker faces.

For whatever reasons, Stan was lucky at cards. The Mackerels did not play for high stakes. The games were pretty much penny-ante, but rare was the early, early Saturday morning when Stanley rose from the card table poorer than when he sat down. He was almost always twenty, thirty dollars to the good—usually not the most successful player, and not always a winner, but luck seemed to be on his side.

Stanley didn't mind spending his winnings on beer for the next meeting, either. Gravity Fallers had some peculiar tastes—Pitt Cola, a cola drink that tasted of peaches and that actually contained a peach pit in every can, for example, and for more adult tastes, Rimrock Beer. It was an unassuming brew with a kick—about twice the alcohol by volume of the American average for beers and ales. It was cheap, too, partly because the brewery was only about fifteen miles away, on the rocky banks of the Behrwiz River. The beer's slogan was "Made with Behrwiz water!"

Anyway, after so many years on his own—heck, his marriage had lasted only six hours, due to unforeseen complications and a threat to his life—emerging from his hermit-like existence made Stanley feel almost as if he had a family again.

A second reason for his feeling of content was the simple fact that he was, at long, long last, making money. Oh, the poker winnings didn't count, the winnings and the beer bills just about canceled out, but the Murder Hut was a winner. When he did the books for June, he was pleased to settle all of his bills and still have nearly two thousand bucks to bank.

In June, he received an invitation to join the OATRAD (the Oregon Association of Tourist Resorts And Destinations) and register the Hut as an officially recognized attraction. He'd never heard of the organization, but, heck, it looked legit, four-color brochure and all, and it was another connection that might one day pay off. Dues were twenty-five a month, so he joined up.

Their quarterly meeting fell midway through June, and there he met the operators of some of the other tourist traps: Upside-Down Town, featuring a house that was built, well, upside-down, and Mama Sweetkins' Giant Ball of Yarn and Museum of Knittery, and Mystery Mountain and Log Land and Help Meeee! (a park dedicated to carnivorous plants that attracted and ate flies), and a good many more.

Unfortunately, his reception among the OATRADders, as they called themselves, was a little on the cool side. Ma Sweetkins, a mild-looking but sharp-tongued woman in early middle age, let him in on the reason why. "It's the name of your attraction, dearie," she said.

"What's wrong with it?" Stan asked defensively. "The Murder Hut. It makes people wonder who got murdered and when and why. They get, what you call it, intrigued. Makes 'em want to stop and investigate."

"Dearie," Ma Sweetkins asked, "how many of your visitors are children?"

"Oh, I dunno," Stan said. "Maybe twenty per cent? They don't pay full admission, anyways."

"At my attraction," the lady said, sounding snooty, "children make up fifty per cent of my clientele. It's because of the name. Mama Sweetkins sounds inviting. And that isn't my real name, you know. It's my commercial name. My real one is Arabelle Shmeeve. Put that on a sign and no dad's gonna pull off to see the place. But Mama Sweetkins—the kiddies love their nanas! And when a car loaded with children comes along and they see my ball of yarn, they start in with 'We wanna stop and see the yarn!' I'll bet I do double the business you do. Really, what kind of mom or dad would want to take their little ones through the Murder Hut?"

"Huh," Stan said. "Never thought of it that way."

But he started to think.

He also walked through a couple of the attractions—Upside-Down Town was most like the Murder Hut, it seemed to him, though it was true that it had more for kids, especially, to do.

"Maybe," he muttered to himself as he drove from the meeting—over in Mist Valley—back to the Falls, "I could have like a murder hike. Or a Murder Trail—take the tourists out in like a tram or something to see the Lumberjack Burying Ground. Yeah, cast about a dozen concrete tombstones, make 'em look old and cracked and crumbling, have some rusty axes scattered around, bones layin' on the ground . . .."

Well, maybe not. That wouldn't be very family friendly.

He drove and thought and thought and drove.

* * *

Not that the summer was all profit and friendship and cheer. Far from it.

The absence of Stanford was a constant ache. At night he'd dream of his brother, raging at him for having lost him, begging him "Bring me home, Stanley!" Stan had been sleeping in Ford's former bedroom. After one of those dreams, he locked the bedroom door and moved into a smaller upstairs room. It didn't help all that much.

And there were constant, nagging, lesser worries.

For instance, toward the end of June he received an official-looking envelope from the Roadkill County Tax Assessor's office telling him that he would have a property tax bill of $1,952.44 due in October.

Huh? Property tax? What's that?

In his free time, he made a trip to the town library, found the Government and Taxation section, and sat down and read. "This is like high school for thirty-somethings," he grumbled. However, though he had failed to distinguish himself in actual high school—he had dropped out a month before graduation, in fact, when Filbrick had kicked him out of the house—when he was motivated, Stan really had a sharp mind.

There was only one loophole that could get him out of having to fork over about two grand a year to the Government, and it applied only in Roadkill County and the town of Gravity Falls. Stan read in an old book an odd paragraph:

* * *

_Owing to the Statute of the Infernal Revenue Department of Roadkill County 1.221, subsection A, paragraph gamma, "Annual taxes upon property may be paid in currency of the land or in kind. For purposes of taxation, one milk-producing cow will count as one hundred dollars, a pig of likely disposition and good health will count as fifty dollars, peach pits and banana skins will count as one dollar each, but no turkeys because they spy on me and steal my collar buttons during the night time." Said code was introduced by town founder Sir Lord Quentin Trembley in the Year of our Lord 1863 and has never been amended or abolished. However, there is no record of anyone's ever having paid taxes in a non-monetary form._

* * *

Stan did the math. It appeared he would have to spend more than the tax bill to accumulate a large enough herd to pay in cattle or swine. And he couldn't possibly eat that many bananas and peaches by October.

OK, he had to pay by October 31, so that was July, August, September, most of October. He'd have to save up five hundred a month, he figured. Irritating, but he could do it, and next year he'd be better prepared.

But he'd learned something else from the OATRAD folks. Almost all of the tourist attractions closed up shop by Christmas every year and didn't re-open until around April. "Use the down time to do maintenance," the owner of Upside Down Town advised. "Not much tourist traffic during those months anyhow, 'cept if you got a ski resort, and at that you can't depend on annual snow east of the Cascades. Better just to button up, splash on some paint, and ride it out until warm weather."

So that would be three months without an income. Which meant he had to save up enough to get by. Money, money, money, worry, worry. Stan began to understand why his dad was always so damn grumpy. The pawn shop turned a profit, but it was always a scrabble.

"What I got to do," Stan told himself one morning, sitting at the table with a mug of coffee, a bookkeeping ledger, and a scatter of paper on which he was adding columns of dollars and cents and subtracting columns of expenses and taxes, "is get me a what do you call it, reflux of cash. Wait, that's heartburn. Influx, that's it. Aha! I got the answer to my problems. I gotta knock over a gas station!"

A second mug of coffee moved him to put the kibosh on that. "Nah, what am I sayin'? I gotta stay legit. I ain't Stanley Pines the delinquent no more. I gotta be Stanford Pines, the pillar of respectable society." Besides, though he had made a career of unsuccessfully conning people into buying stuff nobody needed, Stan had always been fundamentally honest, for a loose definition of the word.

Now, though, he had to keep his nose clean in order to stay in town. And he had to stay in town because downstairs there was that bizarre machine that had dragged his brother, the real Stanford, off to who knew where.

In addition to his financial studies, Stan spent worrisome hours poring over a handwritten, un-indexed, maddeningly discursive book.

Its title was _Journal 1_.

In a way, it was the reason for his being in Gravity Falls. Stanford had asked Stanley to come there in order to take the Journal—which Stanford had written himself—far away and destroy it. That had enraged Stanley because he had thought that, at long last, Stanford had come to regret the way Filbrick had unfairly cast him out. Now he couldn't believe that after ten long years of exile, he wasn't welcomed back for a joyful reconciliation. The resulting quarrel and fight had resulted in Stanford's vanishing into the Portal.

Now—Stan hoped—the Journal would show him the way to repair the weird machine and somehow bring his brother back from wherever.

The Journal was, partly, about the Portal.

Trouble was, that section seemed to be incomplete.

And it was hard to understand. Besides, most of the book was taken up with stuff that, Stan thought, was frankly crazy. Stanford wrote of coming to the area to research anomalies. Stanley broke out a dictionary to learn what an anomaly was.

And all but a few pages of the book concerned themselves with such weird things as eyebats, werewolves, exploding toads, mosquitoes that accurately predicted the future with inaccurately spelled warnings, insanity fairies, all sorts of crap that made Stanley believe that his brother had lost his mind, perhaps because of isolation and stress.

Still . . . a few pages described a transuniversal polydimensional metavortex, or "Portal" for short. And as Stanley knew, Ford had built it. And it worked. Or had worked. At least once.

Now to get his brother back, he had to figure out how to make it work twice.

It would take money.

Stanley pushed back from the table and rubbed his tired eyes. Too bad, he thought, he couldn't snag some of those anomalies to show in his museum. That would be a draw.

If only those nutty things were real.

If only.

* * *


	3. The Naming of Names

**Welcome to the Murder Hut**

_(June-July 1982)_

**3: The Naming of Names**

It was a difficult matter.

On a hot Saturday a few days after the tourist trap association meeting, Stanley settled down in the late afternoon. Since attendance always slacked off after about three, he'd decided that five would be the Murder Hut's closing time—not that he wouldn't have opened the door for any wandering tourist from whose pockets the occasional twenty or fifty accidentally fell.

Stan supposed he really should have set Monday as his business accounting day, since the Hut was closed that one day each week, but somehow he'd just drifted into balancing the books on Saturday, so at about five-thirty that afternoon he took out his business ledger, picked up a pencil, and started reviewing the bundle of receipts.

From Sunday through Friday, traffic through the Hut had been OK, but that day, Saturday, had been notably better, so with his tongue sticking from the corner of his mouth, Stan began to go through the receipts and the hand-scribbled notes for stuff like candy bars and sodas.

The first page he worked on had columns for TKTS, MRCHSE, SNKS, and TIPS. Under ticket sales, he had twenty-four entries. Six of them were singles—fifteen a head, ninety bucks for those six. The remaining eighteen were couples or groups. Total admissions came to an even eight hundred dollars. When he added in merchandise sold, snacks bought from the counter or the machine, and tips (only $22.00 in that column, the cheapskates), the grand total looked very nice: $1175.50. Best day so far, and the other tourist-trap owners had assured him that the two weeks running up to Labor Day would be the most lucrative of the summer, easily doubling his normal take or better.

However, the past week hadn't been disappointing. In total, the Hut had grossed a little over $4500, and even with expenses and saving for taxes included, he had netted about $2300. "I gotta save a good part of that for the off months, though," he said.

He settled back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the table, considering the road ahead and his prospects for the next year. Now, on the one hand, he couldn't complain. Twenty-four visitors, all paying admission and most of them buying at least a candy bar, small package of jerky, or a soft drink, and about half buying overpriced merchandise, could give him enough income to cover the costs of mortgage, insurance, supplies, and tax with more than enough to live on.

Still—and this was the sticking point—at, say, an average of a hundred visitors a week (better to be conservative), the income would not begin to cover the cost of repairing the Portal. Now, if he could increase attendance, that would be a deal changer.

For instance, if he could match the attendance at Upside Down Town—the owner had told him that in a typical July, an average day's attendance at his attraction hovered around a hundred and fifty customers—well, at that rate admissions to the Hut alone ought to run three to four thousand. And he'd need that range of profit to buy the kind of electronics fixing the Portal would require. He was very carefully making lists of burned or melted components, with a detailed, if inartistic, sketch of where each went. Most of them were available in specialized electronics stores, but some were hard to locate, while others seemed to be things Ford himself had created. None were cheap.

Stan grunted. What the heck, he'd _have_ to make it work. To get Stanford back, he would make it work. He switched on the table fan and tilted it so it would blow on his face and not on his work surface. Even so, it rolled the pencil toward the table edge, and he just managed to sop it from falling to the floor. Holding it near the point, he tapped the eraser on the table as if he were holding a miniature drum stick.

So . . . increase the draw, up the profit. Start with renaming the place so it wouldn't turn off lovey-dovey young couples or parents of smaller kiddos. He set the ledger aside, sharpened the pencil to a fresh point, and pulled a sheet of paper over on which he brainstormed notions for a more attractive term than "Murder Hut."

Let's see.

NEW NAMES (PICK ONE)

HAUNTED HUT

GHOSTLY GARDENS

PARANORMAL PLACE

SPOOKY SHACK

MUSEUM OF MAGIC

PALACE OF PUZZLES

MYSTERIOUS MANSION

STAN'S HOUSE O'WONDER

Stan read over the list, tapping his pencil impatiently. Then, shaking his head, he drew a line through each possibility. They didn't exactly sing.

None of those names leaped out as the inevitable right one. True, there was no great rush to change the name, because he still had five months to save up a cushion for the spring, and that was do-able. He knew, though, that he wouldn't make much headway in repairing the Portal unless in the new year he could bring in more serious (and preferably free-spending) numbers of tourists.

Doodling a series of dollar signs on the bottom of his list, Stan thought, _Whoops, nearly forgot. To get an ad placed with the OATRAD bunch, I gotta submit the copy by October fifteenth, so I need a new sign on the roof by that deadline. Still—got some time before I gotta settle on a name for the joint._

The tourist-trap association annually published a booklet, the Oregon Regional Guide and State Map, and a quarter-page ad came free with membership in the organization. Stan figured his best ad copy would be a nice small color photo of the place, and under it a caption that identified it and served as a come-on. His days on the road had persuaded him of the value of advertising, and his natural greed—no, parsimony—nah, a better word is _thrift_ —meant that he couldn't pass up a free ad.

Hundreds of thousands, if not a million, people would see it. For some reason the booklet, called O.R.G.A.S.M. for short, was a hot and self-supporting seller even at the token price of fifty cents a copy.

* * *

That Saturday night, Stan went out for dinner, planning to eat at Greasy's Diner. It was OK, the food wasn't great but not all that bad, it was pretty cheap, and the owner, Shep "Greasy" Grierson, was a fellow Mackerel.

Stan sat at the counter and without looking at the menu, ordered a burger all the way and, instead of fries, a fruit cup. The fries were free with the burger, the fruit cup was normally an extra $1.25, but Shep let it be an even trade, so in effect Stan got a menu item free of charge and richer in nutrients than fried potatoes.

Manly Dan was there, too, and the Duskertons, plus the usual scatter of lumberjacks and truckers, groups of teens out for dinner and a movie. The talk was mostly of the new development, Gravity Malls, then under construction. Opinion was divided—it would be good because it would draw customers downtown, and they might be encouraged to shop even at non-mall stores, it was bad because it would suck shoppers away from the mattress store, the convenience store, and the Mercantile and places like that.

"It's gonna have a multiplex theater, too," one of the teen girls chirped. "It'll be nice, having three or four movies to choose from instead of whatever's playing at the Theater Time."

"Not enough people in town to support two theaters," Greasy said as he polished the counter with a rag. "Hey, Stan, you chipped in for the Fourth yet?"

"What in the who now?" Stan asked.

Olga Krumpf, owner of the Beauty Spot Salon, was at a table with two of her hairdressers. She called out, "Shep, he's not in the Chamber of Commerce yet."

"Oh," Greasy said. "Oh, well, now you turned your house into a business, you oughta join the C-O-C."

Stan sighed. "How much?"

"Uh—hey, Olga, what's the annual?"

Manly Dan, who owned a lumberyard, answered: "Twenty bucks a month or two hundred if you pay at one time for the whole year."

"Yeah, that's it," Greasy said.

"Worth it?" Stan asked.

Young Buddy Gleeful, a salesman at Good Enough Used Cars, said in his Southern-accented voice, "Oh, my, yes it is. A good Chamber of Commerce promotes a lively and profitable business community and just everybody benefits."

Pa Duskerton laughed. "Oh, Buddy, we all know why you're so business-oriented. It's because you're saving up to buy a partnership in the used-car lot."

"Man ought to have an ambition," Manly Dan said.

"OK, I guess I'm in," Stan said. "Who do I pay?"

"Drop in at the C-O-C office on Monday," Olga said. "It's on the first floor of Northwest Office Suites."

"Will do," Stan said.

"The Fourth fund's extra," Greasy told him. "Most businesses give one per cent of a week's profit or a hundred bucks, whichever's cheapest."

"Yeah, well, first I'd have to know what it's for," Stan said, munching his burger.

"Oh, the fund pays for fireworks and picnic on the lake," Ma Duskerton said. "It's a Fourth of July tradition. We've had it every year for ages and ages, and even when the war made fireworks scarce, we still met for the picnic. Everybody comes to it."

"If you contribute, you also get your business listed as a supporter," Pa Duskerton added helpfully.

"Can I pay in the office?" Stan asked.

"Oh, sure."

Stan had walked into town—it was just over a mile—and as he headed back to the Hut after dinner, he ruefully reflected, "I just blew three hundred and five bucks on one meal. I gotta be more careful."

However, on June 27 he found the small office of the Chamber of Commerce, across from Northwest Realty and next to Adam, Checkham, and Billem, CPAs. He noted that the office also served as a town visitor's guide—a rack held trifold brochures and leaflets for local businesses and attractions. He took a handful after paying membership fees for—well, the Murder Hut would change, so he made it under Stanford Pines Enterprises.

"Hey," he said to the girl at the counter, "if I want to put a folder in here for my businesses, how much will that run me?"

"It's free," she said. "Have them printed and drop off as many as you want, and we'll display them. As long as you're a member of the Chamber."

"Good deal," he said. "Oh, am I in time to have my business listed as a Fourth of July supporter?"

"Sure," she said. "It's just a mimeographed list run off with the schedule of events. How would you like that?"

Stan wrote it out for her: The Murder Hut and Cottage of Curiosities, Tues-Sun 9-5, 618 Gopher Road.

"Oh, right," she said. "I heard about that. You're the scientist guy up on Gopher Road, right?"

"Right," Stan said. "You oughta come and go through the place. Remind me you work for the Chamber, and I'll give you half-off admission."

"I'll do that," she said with a smile.

Stan walked back to the Shack—it was an awfully hot day, but walking saved gas money, and at a dollar twenty a gallon, gas money mounted up—feeling cheerful. That young woman, her desk plate said her name was Julia Ramirez, was a striking black-haired beauty, red lips and big brown eyes. Maybe . . ..

Sadly his good mood melted in the heat of the day. By the time he got home again, Stan had decided _No dames. Not until I get my brother back._

He missed female company. He thought wistfully of Marilyn, whom he'd married in Vegas and who had the marriage annulled six hours later. It wasn't that she hated him. In fact, she was very nearly in love with Stan, but—

At that point in his life, thanks to some unforgiving and bloodthirsty mobsters, Stanley Pines was a dangerous man to get close to. He'd warned Marilyn to dissolve the marriage and had given her his life savings in apology. Ah, Marilyn, so sorry.

He spent the rest of the afternoon poring through Stanford's Journal. Even with the help of a dictionary and some second-hand high-school science books, he found the material difficult as he tried to understand what the book's description and partial diagram of the machine meant.

"Ford, where the heck did you hide the other volumes?" he muttered.

Back in the middle of winter, Ford had given Stan Volume 1 of the journals but had also let it drop that there were more. Speaking of the Portal, Ford had said, "I created it to unlock the mysteries of the universe. But it could just as easily be harnessed for terrible destruction. That's why I shut it down and hid my journals, which explained how to operate it. There's only one journal left."

_I hid my journals._

"Yeah, but where, Poindexter?" Stan asked as he lay in bed.

From wherever he might have wound up, Ford failed to answer him.

Trouble was, Stan suspected, the diagram of the Portal might be spread through two or more other books.

With the one Journal he possessed spread open on his chest, Stanley drowsed, still muttering, "Where, Poindexter? Where?"

* * *


	4. It Gets Weird

**Welcome to the Murder Hut**

* * *

**4-It Gets Weird**

_(July-August 1982)_

The Fourth of July came. Stan attended the picnic and fireworks show at the lake and found it corny. Corny—but somehow reassuring and cozy, too. At least a thousand folks, maybe more, gathered on the shore of Lake Gravity Falls to watch a truly spectacular fireworks display.

Watching the rockets soar and blossom into vibrant red, violet, blue, green, yellow, gold, and silver, whistling their way up and booming their way out, Stanley couldn't help grinning. He remembered his childhood days in Glass Shard Beach, when he and Ford would climb up onto the roof of Pines Pawns to watch the big fireworks display out at the Boardwalk, a long way off.

It was so far that once they saw the colorful explosion of a high-flying mortar firework, seconds would tick by until the echoing boom rolled over them. Stanford cheerfully explained that light travels a lot faster than sound. From their rooftop to the fireworks show, the light of the rockets reached them just about instantaneously, but the sound lagged behind. They tried counting the seconds—one Mississippi, two Mississippi, and so on—and when they agreed that after a big fiery burst it took nine seconds for them to hear the explosion.

"That means it's two miles from here to the Boardwalk!" Ford said. "Or just about that, anyway."

"That can't be right," Stanley objected. "Beedee Verdlach's got an odometer on her bike, and it measures it out at four miles."

"Are you dating Beedee?" Stanford asked, giggling. "Ouch!"

"Never say that again!" Stanley said, laughing. "She just let me ride her bike one day, and I measured it out 'cause we walk that way to go to the beach!"

"Don't hit my arm so hard!" Ford said. "Hey, Stan, I wouldn't blame you. Beedee is kinda cute."

"Stanford loves Beedee!" Stan chanted.

Well, what did you expect? They had just turned thirteen the month before. And Beedee was an older woman. She was thirteen and a half.

"I do not! But she's not bad looking. Anyway, the reason for the difference—Whoa! One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . .." Stan joined in and again they got to nine Old Man Rivers before the explosion thundered, so loud that they felt it rattle their bones as well as pound on their eardrums.

"See," Ford said, pursuing the scientific track again, "sound travels about seven hundred and sixty miles an hour. That works out to one mile every five seconds. Nine seconds and a bit means the distance to the source of the noise must be a little more than 1.8 miles away. But that's in a straight line. When we walk or ride a bike, though, we have to go on the streets. We have to wind around blocks and to go out of our way, like when we have to detour to go across the bridge on First Street, so we take a curving, indirect, and longer route."

"Anyway," Stanley said, "the way we walk and the way Beedee rides her bike, it's four miles and a little bit more. Look at that! Big finale!"

In the distance, a curtain of streaks and a shower of sparks made silhouettes of the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster. About 9.3 seconds later, the pops and crackles and whistles and booms reached them. They could even faintly hear the sound of the crowd cheering the last big display.

"It would be cool to see that from the top of the Ferris wheel," Ford said.

"Yeah, it would! Maybe next year?"

"Dad won't let us go there on our own," Ford said.

"We could sneak out."

"No," Ford said sadly. "We wouldn't dare."

Reluctantly, Stan agreed. "No, we wouldn't."

Anyway, Gravity Falls's Fourth of July display at least measured up to the ones he remembered from his childhood. And he did meet more townsfolk. And in the following days, a good many of them came out and took the Murder Hut tour at fifteen dollars a person.

All the while, Stan kept pondering a better name for the place.

* * *

Secret Shack

Confusion Clearing

The Pines Center for the Unexplained

Professor Strange's Museum of the Weird

Mystifying Manor

Cabin of Curiosities

* * *

He also kept striking them out, one after the other. He would know it when he saw it, but—well, to date he had not seen it.

As August drew near, Stan went into town to make his first shopping expedition for replacement Portal parts. He began with an assortment of capacitors, since they seemed relatively mundane and cheaper than other, more exotic components.

Surprisingly for such a small town, Gravity Falls did have a dedicated electronics store—not a Radio Shack, but something called Economical Electronicals. It had once been a five-and-dime, he thought, and it was still a sizable store for a town like the Falls. Shelves lined all the walls and standing displays crowded the floor space—TV and radio sections, a whole display of McG Phones, which were cordless and reminded Stan of a scale-model version of a World War II walkie-talkie. The price tag for each McG Phone was four thousand dollars, and a note said that the phones would work with a wireless network expected to be in place by Christmas of 1983.

"Sucker bait," Stan muttered. "It'll never catch on."

Toward the rear of the store were electronic components. A young guy—his name, Stan remembered from the Fourth of July picnic, was Ernie something—came over and asked, "May I help you?"

"Uh, yes," Stan said. "I have a list here of fifty assorted capacitors. Some I need only one of, others from four to thirty. Do you have these?"

"Let me see . . . this shouldn't be a problem. If you want to give me about an hour to get these together, you can come back and pick them up."

"That'll be fine," Stan said. "Uh, it won't come to more than four hundred, will it?"

Ernie put on a pair of reading glasses and went through the list more slowly. "I don't think it will," he said. "I'd estimate maybe three hundred and fifty to four hundred dollars for this lot."

"OK, if it goes to more than four hundred, I'll put off buying some until next month. This isn't a project with a deadline."

It was lunchtime, so Stan walked to the Stew and Brew, a lunch counter specializing in coffee and, well, various soups and stews and sandwiches. He ate, dropped in at the news stand to browse some magazines and buy a _Gravity Falls Gossiper,_ the local paper that came out once a week, every Monday. It wasn't much of a paper, but everybody in the Valley seemed to read it.

Which gave him an idea. He checked the subscription note on page 2, found the _Gossiper_ office, and dropped in. It seemed to be pretty much a one-man operation—or rather a one-old-guy-and-his-one-old-wife one. He was typing away in a back room; she was sitting at a desk out front, blue-penciling a newspaper column already run off in type.

"Can I help you?: she asked. "Oh, it's you! Dear, it's that man with the museum, Dr. Pines!"

"Right, right, Stan . . . ford Pines. _Doctor_ Stanford Pines, that's me. Listen, I'm interested in placing a display ad in the paper. How do I go about that?"

It took only about twenty minutes. "We'll need a photo of the place," she said.

"I'll bring one in."

"Well—do you have one?"

As a matter of fact, the day after Stan had climbed up on the roof—just before a torrential storm broke—he'd gone out into the fresh, hazy morning and had shot a dozen photos of the Hut with its new yellow-and-red sign. He had them in an envelope, not sure what to do with them. "Yeah," he said. "I can come back this afternoon."

"Oh, don't fuss yourself. Our son Toby can ride his bike out and pick it up. Toby! Toby, where are you?"

A timid-looking and unusually ugly teen boy came out. He wore rimless glasses, a brown pompadour, and an unfortunate mustache. "Yes, Mother?" he asked.

"Dear, this is Dr. Stanford Pines. Dr. Pines, this is our son, Toby Determined. Listen, Toby, I want you to ride your bike out to Dr. Pines's house on Gopher Road and bring back a photo."

"Right now?" Toby asked in an aw-Mom-I'm-about-to-get-a-high-score-on-Pac-Man tone.

"Nah, how about in an hour?" Stan asked. "I got a few errands to run. It's 618—"

"I know," Toby said. "I took the tour. OK, I'll be there at, um, two, OK? Only please be there, 'cause I got to be back in town for my dance lesson at three."

"It's a deal," Stan said.

He left the hole-in-the-wall newspaper building and returned to Economical Electronicals to pick up his capacitors. To his surprise, when he entered the store no one seemed to be on duty, but he heard quarreling voices coming from an office in the rear left corner. "Hey, hello?" he called. "I'm here for my order!"

Instead of Ernie, the clerk, a guy with cracked glasses, a big nose, unruly hair and the raggedy beginnings of a beard, stalked out. "You!" he said, visibly shaking.

"Uh, right, I was buying some capacitors—"

"I know what you're up to! I'll have nothing to do with it! I told you that—you can't buy materials in my store. Get out of my store, Stanford! All I want to do is forget you and your machine! Sxolq ndn aefnnxv mhma hlue!" He grabbed his head with both hands and began to scream, "I want to forget!"

"I'll . . . let myself out," Stan said. He hurried out, glad at least that he had not prepaid for his components. Only later did he learn the babbling guy's name: Madman McGucket, townspeople were calling him.

Anyway, he set off walking back to the Hut. It was another sweltering day, and at one point Stan stopped to take off and clean his spectacles—he was sweating pretty freely and a drop was running down the right lens. As he stepped well off the highway and took out his handkerchief, a shadow passed over him. He snapped his head back and saw what at first he took to be a light plane gliding a hundred feet overhead. Then he jammed his glasses back on and yelled, "Holy moley!"

It wasn't an airplane at all—it was a dragon.

No, not a dragon. It was one of those flying dinosaur things. Ford would know! Despite the heat, Stan ran the last quarter of a mile to the Hut, propped the ladder up on the eaves, and clambered to the roof peak. He had a clear view of the surroundings from there, and—yes, the flying thing was higher, a thousand feet up or more and circling, with occasional flaps of its enormous bat-like wings.

"What the heck?" Stan muttered, wishing he had Ford's binoculars. The creature didn't move like a living thing. It was more mechanical. As if it had spotted him up there on top of the house, the dino—ptero-something, that was it, but the rest of the name eluded him—dived, folding back its wings and swooping down like a striking hawk.

"Whoa!" Stan dropped to his belly, slipping two feet down the steep roof, as the creature—no, the machine, he could see rivets as it swooped past—feinted at him and then flapped and rose again. Though it was obviously a device and not a living animal, it made no noise.

This time as it gained altitude, the thing flapped away, heading for Mount Treacherous, on top of which a stone tower rose. People in town had told Stan that it had been built by a Mr. Trembley a hundred and twenty years ago as a guard tower to protect the Valley from invading land octopuses. It must have worked, because nobody had ever seen an invading cephalopod in all the time since.

The pterodactyl, uh, robot, he guessed, landed atop the tower and folded its wings. Stan hurried down the ladder and into the Hut, where he quickly drank a beer. And then changed clothes.

Not long afterward, Toby Determined cycled up. Stan had picked out a photo and had stapled it to a sheet of paper with his hand-written ad copy:

* * *

**NOW OPEN!**

THE MURDER HUT! MYSTERIES AND MAGIC! BE BEFUDDLED! FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY! OPEN TUES-SUN, 9:00-5:00. ASK ABOUT SPECIAL GROUP RATES!

* * *

Stan put the photo and the ad copy in a manila envelope, handed it to the teen, and then said, "Hey, uh, Tommy—"

"Toby," said Toby.

"Right, you. Uh, has anybody in town ever noticed a big flying thing, looks like a dinosaur or dragon or something?"

Toby grinned. "Oh, that's McGucket's pterorobotmajig. He flies it around now and then. Usually it stays up on the stone tower on Mount Treacherous, but sometimes people see it flying."

"Uh-huh. And, uh, who's McGucket?"

"He owns the electronics store. You never heard this from me, but my folks think he's kind of—" Toby circled a forefinger near his temple and chirped, "Coocoo! Coocoo!"

"Oh, OK," Stan sand. "Uh, thanks, kid. Here's a buck. You better get back to the paper with that so's you don't miss your, uh, was it dance lesson?"

"I'm gonna be a razzle-dazzle dancer one day!" the kid said. "Thanks, Doctor Pines!"

When Toby left, Stan hunted up Ford's binoculars, a strange design, with a battery-powered box near the focus wheel. He clambered back to the roof, zoomed in on the tower way off on Mount Treacherous, and stared at the figure of the pterodactyl. It sat with wings folded and head raised high. Trying to focus, Stan touched a button—and suddenly the picture sharpened and zoomed in.

Now the dragonish head filled his field of vision. "Man," Stan muttered. "If I could buy that thing off him, what an exhibit it'd be. I wonder—whoa!"

The creature's eyes opened and glowed red-orange. Then the mouth opened and snapped threateningly.

Stan had no doubt that it saw him and knew what he was doing. He gulped and hurriedly climbed down to earth again.

Just as he reached the second rung, he saw something dash beneath the porch. It looked like—couldn't be, but looked like—a little man not even two feet tall, wearing a kind of pointy red hat and a white beard.

He hunkered down and looked under the porch, just in time to see the little guy scamper out on the far side. Stan leaped up onto the porch and dashed across it. "Hey, you! Stop!"

The miniature man spun around and snarled. He—or it—clenched a struggling rat between its teeth. It swiped a threatening hand (paw?) at Stan and then vanished in the undergrowth at the edge of the yard.

Definitely shaken, Stan went inside. Maybe his brother's journal wasn't a work of fiction, as he had started to think.

That evening, as he got ready to shower, Stan noticed his right forearm was itching and somewhat inflamed. Mosquito bites. Opening the medicine cabinet and rummaging the shelves, looking for calamine lotion or something to relieve itching, he suddenly realized that the pink welts of the bites were in the form of letters.

DRANGE

"Drange?" he muttered. "What the heck?"

He wasn't great at anagrams, but he wondered if the word the bites tried to spell might be . . . danger? Deranged? He didn't know. He did know one thing, though.

Things were getting _weird_.

* * *


	5. Enterpreneuring

**Welcome to the Murder Hut**

_(August 1982)_

* * *

**5-Enterpreneuring**

The longer the summer went on, the more Stan became convinced that he needed to—what was the word he'd found in that book he'd bought off the bargain table, _The 1979 Entrepreneur's Guide: How YOU Can Make a Bundle in Business!—_ oh, yeah, the word was "rebranding." He needed to _rebrand_ the Murder Hut.

However, he put that so far on the back burner that it barely simmered. His volume had increased, and he had to scramble every day to conduct tours and man the sales counter and then after hours he was always driving here and there to buy merch for stocking the shelves. The souvenir business picked way up. And, as the other tourist-trap operators had advised him, as Labor Day crept closer, business kept getting, well, busier.

True, the Murder Hut had yet to approach the kind of numbers Upside-Down Town boasted, but days with twenty to thirty carloads of visitors became more and more common. The Hut was turning a profit, Stan was socking away money for taxes and for the lean months of winter, and he had to hustle to make sure his shelves were stocked and his merch was moving. Planning, too, that was important. If a few cheap roadside signs brought trade in, who knew what some real advertising might do?

Stan had started to make lists to aid his preparations. The candy that sold quickest from the boxes on the counter was Pop Rocks. Second was Big League Chew. He'd bought a second-hand ice-cream freezer that now stood beside the check-out counter, and from it he was selling so many Popsicles, Fudgsicles, and ice-cream bars that the freezer was rapidly paying for itself. One Monday as he drove up to the Dalles, a much bigger town than Gravity Falls, to browse his supplier's shop for snacks and wholesale trinkets for the gift shop, he caught up to a bus.

It wasn't a transport bus or a charter one, but it seemed to belong to a private company. At first Stan paid attention to it only because he was looking for a clear stretch of highway to pass it, but then the logo on the back doors registered with him: EXPLOREGON TOURS.

Instead of passing the bus, he decided to follow it. After ten miles, it pulled off at a scenic spot, Tannamana Falls, and parked in a small paved lot where a dozen cars already stood. Crowds of shorts-and-polo-shirt tourists spilled out and cameras began to click.

Off to the west, Mount Hood stood tall and frosty-peaked, but dead ahead a pretty waterfall, thirty feet tall, spilled into a deep pool from which a whitewater creek leaped and bubbled over a rocky bottom. The bus driver was a plump, cheery-looking woman close to forty, black hair, mocha complexion, big brown doe eyes. To the tourists, she announced, "OK, folks, we'll stay here for thirty minutes. Stretch your legs, take your pictures, and be back at the bus at eleven, and we'll be off to have lunch in a great place overlooking the river."

"Excuse me," Stan said to her.

She turned and took him in. He was wearing slacks and a red Hawaiian shirt. "What can I do for you?" she asked with a kind of neutral smile.

Her own outfit was reminiscent of a park ranger's uniform—khakis and a green trucker's cap with a white circle on the front containing a stylized pine tree emblem. But over her left breast was the ExplOregon Tours logo—a cartoony Mount Hood behind a serrated row of cartoony evergreens. "I operate an attraction in Gravity Falls," Stan said. "Ever heard of the place?"

She frowned thoughtfully. "Gravity Falls? Is it in Oregon?"

"Yeah, just a few miles south of here," he said. "It's got a beautiful lake and waterfall. Nice kind of unspoiled small town, worth a visit. Anyways, I just wanted to ask about your business. Have you got, like, a card? I guess I didn't even know about tour buses and such."

"Yeah, here you go." She reached into her breast pocket and handed him a business card: _ExplOregon Tours: See the Scenic Northwest in Comfort_ , with a Portland address and phone number. "Call that number, ask for Ross, R-O-S-S. He's our public-relations guy, and he can tell you all about us."

"How many buses do you operate, if you don't mind my asking?"

She shrugged. "I don't know the exact number, but we run sixteen out of Portland, and there are garages in Eugene and Burns, too. The Burns one's small and just does the desert tours. I suppose we have, oh, I'd say thirty vehicles in all. I drive the forty-passenger ones like this bus, but some VIP units take only twelve or twenty-four on a run, and we've got at least six that carry sixty passengers each. Every bus has air-conditioning and a bathroom."

"Thank you. Oh, I'm Stanford Pines, by the way."

"Fran Mataro."

"Pleased to meet you. You ever happen to be in Gravity Falls, come look me up. My joint's called the Murder Hut, but I think that's gonna change."

"Stanford. Unusual name."

"Friends call me Stan. You and I ought to get together, maybe go visit California. Think of it—Stan, Fran, Frisco!"

She laughed. "Funny! But I'm married. My hubby is the dispatcher."

"Worth a shot," Stan said, grinning. "I'll let you get back to your tourists. I gotta get me some business cards. But remember—Stan Pines, Gravity Falls. You and your husband ever want to drop in, the tour's on the house."

"Thanks, man!"

And that chance encounter made Stan think. _One busload of suckers would be as many as I get on a good day. I'll put gettin' in touch with tour-bus companies on my to-do list for next season!_

* * *

Stanford was the writer in the family. Look at his journals. Look at those stacks of academic magazines Stan had found in Ford's bedroom. He'd wondered why Ford had those thirty-odd publications neatly filed in cardboard library boxes. They didn't look interesting to Stan—magazines like the _Journal of Speculative Mathematics_ and _Paraphysics Researches._

Then one sleepless night, he had started leafing through a few—hey, it sounded like stuff that would put you to sleep after ten cups of coffee—and saw Ford's name. It was under a magazine article title: "Quantum Strangeness and Paraphysical Manifestations: A Trans-Mathematical Link?" by Stanford F. Pines, Ph.D.

It made as much sense to Stan as a page of ancient Greek. But then he paged through another dozen issues of the academic journals and found more essays signed by his brother. Huh. Guy was famous in nerd circles. Who knew?

But if Ford could do it, Stan could do a little scribbling, too. Unlike Ford, Stan didn't buy fancy-schmancy blank-paged books. He just used yellow pads.

A typical entry:

* * *

_The Tarot decks not big sellers. Good markup, but only college kids want them. Packs of postcards popular, need more up to date photos tho. Maybe get that kid from the paper to borrow the office camera and ramble around taking pictures that could be printed up as postcards._

_Gotta find more of those flying saucer keychains. China Knick Knax has a similar one that glows in dark. Wholesale cost is two cents more per unit, maybe mark it up from a buck a throw to a buck-fifty. Order two gross and see how they sell._

_Found copyright has expired on old book,_ Legends and Lore of the Pacific Northwest. _Look into printing costs to see if it would pay to publish cheap edition for sale in shop._

_That flying dinosaur was out again yesterday. Tried to take some Polaroids, they were blurry. Wonder if I can find a taxidermist to fake up a scale model of one of those things. Hang it in the museum. Put up the blurry photos. Exhibit: "Do Dinos Still Live?"_

_Dan Corduroy's cousin stuffs fish, he says. Get his name from Dan, ask him about the possibilities. Maybe worth a hundred or so if he can do it._

* * *

All in all, August was a busy time. Hot time, too—Stan had spent time in Vegas, Florida, Mexico, and Colombia, and a heat wave in Gravity Falls could measure up to any of them. The Hut wasn't air-conditioned, and retrofitting it for that would be really expensive. He ran fans in the Museum and gift shop, and in his bedroom he sweated out the hot nights.

Maybe because of the heat, he had odd dreams. In them, he must have been in Egypt, because he seemed to be surrounded by vast yellow pyramids. Sometimes one would open a big round eye and stare at him.

As the month wound down, Stan put in long hours. He'd practiced his spiels and his jokes and patter. He also adopted a costume.

That was partly because, needing new trousers, he had visited an outlet shop in Portland. He'd had to make the drive anyway to search for some of those esoteric electronic components of the Portal that McGucket refused to sell him. Oh—he'd learned that the proprietor of Economical Electronical was Dr. F.H. McGucket, who was increasingly becoming known as the town kook.

Anyway, on the outskirts of Portland he'd driven past an outlet plaza that advertised "50% Off Name Brands," and while he had his doubts, Stan had dropped into a men's clothing store. He had found racks of factory seconds that were indeed half off (or sometimes more) from factory firsts. He bought six pairs of trousers and, because it was on clearance and fit him, a black suit, originally $400.00 but marked down to $25.00.

And that became his costume. He wore it, examined himself in the mirror, and then on impulse added his Holy Mackerel fez, which had been hanging on a peg next to the mirror.

Huh. Not bad. He opened a bureau drawer and started to pull out ties, seeking one that might complement the suit and fez. In ten years of moving from state to state and selling various items advertised by cheaply made TV ads, he'd collected a lot of ties. None of them looked quite right. But there in the bottom of the drawer he saw what at first he thought was a bolo tie—he didn't remember having one, but he'd lived in Texas for a while, so—

Ah, no. it was a black eyepatch. Stan grinned. Oh, yeah. Fast Eddie Pinter had given him that way back, God, ten years and more. Old Pinkie had taken it off of a big lug who'd roughed him up.

Stan tried the eyepatch on. Pretty memorable! And the bolo tie—he didn't own one, but he could get one, a bolo or string tie, one of those. Maybe maroon to match the fez. Oh, and his eight-ball cane! Useful if a tourist got angry or pushy and needed a tap to quiet him down.

"There he is," Stan said, pointing at his own reflection. "The Mysterious Mr. Pines, Master of the Murder Hut! Hah!"

It worked. The tourists that day paid more attention, laughed more at the corny jokes, followed him with interest as he spun his tall tales. And, hot damn, he began to collect more generous tips—not just singles, but five bucks sometimes.

About a week after he'd first donned the suit, he got a great tip from some well-heeled guy, the pop of a family of five, count 'em, five kids, all of them twelve and younger. While his wife and the youngsters poked around the shelves, the guy walked right up to Stan and gave him a fifty!

"Uh—" Stan said. There was a word you were supposed to say. Oh, yeah! "Thanks."

"Thank _you_!" the guy had said. "That's the quietest these kids have been in two days!"

"My pleasure!" Stan replied with a grin. "Come back next year—I'm gonna have new exhibits and new stuff to see and do."

The second-youngest kid, a girl about six, sidled up and shyly asked, "Will you take a picture with me?"

"Sure!" Stan said. He stood her up on the counter and put an arm around her, and Pop snapped a photo. "Hey, OK to give the kiddos a candy treat? On the house?" Stan had asked.

"Sugar rush," the guy sighed, rolling his eyes. "But . . . OK."

"Kids!" Stan said. "Each of you grab a candy bar. It's free! One per person, now!"

So one got M&Ms, one a chocolate bar, and so on. And the little girl had selected a rainbow-hued all-day sucker and then hugged him and said, "Thank you, Mr. Mystery!"

Mr. Mystery.

Stan liked it.

Good ring to it.

Mr. Mystery. That was it!

* * *


	6. The Decline and Fall of Stanley Pines

**Welcome to the Murder Hut**

_(Autumn-winter 1982)_

* * *

**6-The Decline and Fall of Stanley Pines**

The way the decline and fall of Stanley Pines started was an unlucky accident. The Stanleymobile was Stan's pride and joy, as far as transportation went. It had taken him safely from New Jersey pretty much all over North America and had finally dropped him off in central Oregon.

Even in lean times, he'd always been careful with maintenance. Admittedly, when he had been on the run from Rico and his goons, things had slipped. The car needed new shocks, new tires, a tune-up for sure, maybe even a valve job.

Now that he had some income in Gravity Falls, he found a young mechanic, not more than a year or so out of high school, who'd apprenticed with his dad and uncle and who now ran the best garage and repair shop in Roadkill County. His name was Steve, and he gradually managed to repair ten long years of wear and tear on the classic El Dorado, even buffing dents and applying a gleaming new paint job.

However, he told Stanley, very frankly, "This thing's always gonna be a gas hog. I mean, it's cool and classic, but it guzzles the gas."

And that was true. The El Diablo had a powerful engine, but a heavy body. On the open highway, it racked up about eleven miles per gallon, on city streets twelve point five. That was not so bad for 1975, but in 1982, a new car could get double that mileage. "Maybe I oughta get a beat-up old car to do my runnin' around in," Stan said.

Steve thought for a minute. "I could let you have my car that I drove all through high school for cheap. It's a '69 Valiant, but it runs good, and I kinda worked on it so it gets about eighteen miles per gallon. Since my dad retired, I got his car, and the Val's been sitting in the garage for a year now. I'd take five hundred for it. Unless you want to trade in the El Diablo."

"Nuh-uh," Stan said. "The El Diablo is kinda my good-luck charm. Could I look at the Valiant one day?"

The next week, Steve called to say the car was there.

Stan went over and took a look and then took a test drive. "Little cramped for me," he said. "Also, not much acceleration."

"But it's in good shape. Last you at least five years of pretty hard driving."

They dickered and reached an agreement at four hundred and fifty, half now, half in October. That was how Stan began to make his runs to The Dalles or even further in the smaller yellow four-door sedan. In addition to his trips to wholesalers, Stan also made it a practice to check out garage and estate sales, and during a September drive down to Chiloquin to check out a recently deceased magician's estate sale, he got stopped by the county Mounties in Klamath County.

He had been speeding—ten miles over the limit—and he ruefully agreed to accept the ticket and pay the fine.

However when he took his wallet out, instead of giving the deputy his brother's Oregon driving license (the usual bad photo could have been him, it was hard to tell), Stan took out his own. It was from Idaho, granted, but it was in his right name of Stanley F. Pines, and it was current. The young cop wrote out the ticket—the fine was $75.00 and he could pay by mail, but it would cost him a point on his license, so on and so forth.

Stan signed, the cop let him go, and for the rest of the trip, Stanley stayed carefully within the speed limits. The estate sale was pretty much a bust, though he did buy a ventriloquist's gimmick and a fortune-telling game that the magician had invented.

He promptly paid the fine by mail, grateful that he'd just happened to pull out his own driver's license instead of his brother's. At least he'd kept Stanford's driving history clean. Somehow, though, that little incident gave him the sense of being two people at once: There was Stanford Pines, the jolly, science-educated but folksy proprietor of the Murder Hut, a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel, and then on the other hand he was Stanley Pines, the slightly shady fellow who wasn't above conning someone.

As Stanley, he bargained and schemed and all but robbed, accumulating rare and mysterious junk for the Hut. Stanley got the exhibits by fair means or tricky ones, and Stanford exploited them. Any time Stan was, as his dad used to say, up to no good, he carried his own ID. All other times, he was Stanford.

The Hut's business traffic dropped off sharply after Labor Day, then in early October came up a little. Things were brisk enough to keep the doors open and the lights on, but Stan started to watch nickels and dimes again. When the ticket sales picked up a bit, at least from Wednesday through Sunday afternoons, he breathed a little easier. He could still buy food, pay his mortgage, save a little, and keep himself in clothes.

Still, he grimaced as he shelled out the couple of thousand for property taxes. Gradually he cut back on the days open and the hours of operation, until the Hut operated only Thursdays through Sundays, 11:00-5:00, though he added a hopeful note that the Hut could be rented for weddings or birthday celebrations. There were no takers.

"Slim pickings through April, I guess," he said. He did have the idea of sponsoring a Halloween party on the grounds. Admission was five dollars for kids, ten for adults. Once more Steve, the youngest person he knew, came in handy—did Steve know some kid who could DJ for a dance?

Yes, it happened he did. Wally was Steve's age—they'd been in high school together—and now he was the youngest voice at KGFR, though to be sure he was only heard on the graveyard shift, from midnight through the farm report. However, Wally Vimbel did have a huge collection of 45 rpm records and two good turntables, and he'd DJ for fifty dollars, free snacks, and tips.

Back in June, Stan had been puzzled one night when a bunch of kids came knocking on the Hut door and chanting, "Trick or Treat!" He learned about the odd tradition of Summerween then. Fortunately, he had a couple of boxes of candy bars for the vending machine, and also fortunately, the Hut was far enough from town so only about fifteen little monsters came begging.

But that was Summerween. The way people talked about it, a man could easily guess that the real thing would be at least as popular. Looking for a little profit, the week before Halloween, Stan announced a masquerade dance for the teens and some fun games—guess the number of jelly beans, ring toss, the Wheel of Prizes, and so on—for the little guys. It would be another way of establishing his presence in the community.

At that time of his life, Stan got very little sleep. Generally, after locking up the Murder Hut to tourists, he'd either cook something simple, like broiling a steak, or go out to eat at Greasy's or one of the other fine establishments. By eight he'd be down in the labs, working on the Portal. He'd taught himself soldering and had found Ford's cache of tools for the finer points of repair. He had gathered only a tiny percentage of replacement parts, but he did what he could with those.

Stan took it slow because he had to. He took it steady, though, and every night between eight and two in the morning, he patiently replaced burned-out wiring and changed out ruined capacitors and transistors.

As he learned more about this kind of work, he realized that running the Portal would be costly. Ford's weird power cube—was it some kind of battery? Did it somehow pull power from some unknown source, or was there an atomic pile somewhere he really should find out about?

Anyway, that power box mostly took the Hut off the electric grid—but the Portal demanded a whole lot of juice, and that would mean a heck of a power bill one day.

That day lay at least months in the future. Maybe by the first day of next spring, Stan hoped. Maybe by then he could fire up this sucker and bring his brother home. The Journal told him that part of the Portal's construction was a polydimensional scanner. Anything that passed through the Portal would have its own signature, the way a comet approaching the sun leaves a long tail. The dimensional trail left by a Portal traveler might not glow, but the machine could follow it. The scanning was automated and computerized. The machine could check more than a thousand locations a second for a trace of whoever might have gone through.

Eventually, it would lock onto the traveler. It might take weeks of searching, but once the machine was running, inevitably it would lock onto Ford and then it could retrieve him.

It was just a matter of finishing the repairs.

And Stan cheerfully and optimistically estimated that might take six months, tops.

Still, every night he fell into bed exhausted, and when he dragged himself out at eight the next morning, sometimes he wished he'd taken a night off from the repair work.

No. Not really. He wouldn't take a night off. Because he was trying to find a way to find his brother.

* * *

The Halloween party pulled in enough locals to turn a nice little profit, but it was just as well that it fell on a Monday and that the Hut was operating on its reduced schedule. It took Stanley most of November 1 to clean up after the celebration.

Then as he settled down to a lonely home-cooked dinner—well, a frozen pizza, at least a home-warmed-up-dinner—Stan received a delayed Halloween trick pulled on him by Fate, spiteful old hag that she was.

It came in the form of a long-distance telephone call from his cousin back in Glass Shard Beach. "Hey, Stanford," Vinnie said. "Do you happen to know where your brother might be these days?"

"This is me, Vinnie," Stan said. "This is Stanley. Uh, Ford and I are kind of partners in a business now. How's it hanging?"

"Oh, I didn't know you—well—uh, maybe you shouldn't let Stanford know. I mean, it may not be anything to worry about, but—you been laying sort of low out there in Oregon?"

"Well, I'm not broadcasting my presence," Stan said. "What's up?"

"Those guys who don't like you," Vinnie said carefully. "You know, the guys you alerted the Edgars to. They're looking for you."

"I see," Stanley said slowly.

"They're bad news." Vinnie paused. "One especially. Guy named Rico."

Damn. Stan had tried to sic Interpol on that creep. They must have ignored his tip, or maybe they never got it. He had turned it in at an FBI regional office, hoping that would take care of crazy Rico. Maybe the Feds—the "Edgars," Vinnie had called them, after the Bureau's founder, J. Edgar Hoover—had just thought he was crazy and had ash-canned the tip.

"Where'd you get the word?" Stan asked.

"Friends in Philly. It's legit. You watch out."

"Yeah, thanks. I got it." When Stan hung up, he walked out to the back porch, where he'd hauled a thrift-store sofa he'd bought. He sat there and stared out into the gathering dusk.

Rico. Crap. They guy was nuts. At a time of keen need, Stan had—against all his instincts—agreed to a little courier job for Rico. It involved moving some merchandise from Colombia to San Diego.

Not drugs. Stan wasn't a dummy.

Emeralds. For reasons of his own, Rico really, really wanted those green gems.

The caper had gone about as wrong as it could go. Rico had sent goons after Stanley, and at one time they captured him. He had narrowly escaped. But now if Fast Eddie Pinter in Philadelphia was worried about him, Stan was deep in trouble.

He needed to disappear permanently, but there was the Portal to repair. He couldn't just beat it.

He got up and walked to the corner of the house. From there he could see the yellow Valiant, a lemon-colored shape in the twilight.

Maybe if he put his mind to it—maybe, just maybe—there might be a way out.

Between then and Thanksgiving, Stanley Pines behaved in odd, uncharacteristic ways. On days when the Murder Hut was closed, he donned old clothes—clothes that he'd worn while making those cheapo late-night commercials. True, he'd used phony names for them, but it didn't take a critical eye to see that "Eight-Ball Alcatraz" and Steve Pinington, Hal Forrester, and all the rest were one individual.

And wherever he went, Stanley Pines was loud, obnoxious, and memorable. He rented a cheap room in Eugene, which he visited about once a week but never actually slept in.

He did not have a phone installed—he had no phone number. However, he made no secret of his address. Little by little, he moved stuff into his room—a closetful of old clothes, letters addressed to himself there (all of which he mailed to himself from various post-office boxes in Oregon, Washington, northern California, and even one from Idaho). With the letters typed on different machines and signed with different names, they seemed to be communications from a variety of people involved in illegal activity.

Thanksgiving arrived and passed, and with virtually no tourists coming through, the Murder Hut closed down for the season. On the first Sunday in December, Stan drove the Valiant to Eugene, in the southwestern part of the state. He'd become well-acquainted with the area.

A small county road, C618, led westward from Eugene. Stan knew that it wound round and eventually ended at a spot where in 1955 a bridge had washed out. Aside from a few small farms, few people lived that way, and few people drove the highway.

Stan had just the spot. At midnight, he stopped the car on the edge of a steep drop to a rocky river bed. From the trunk he took a few things.

He lay on his shoulder, reached under the car, and in the beam from a small flashlight he cut the brake lines. He squirmed back to his feet, the sweet smell of brake fluid coming sharp to his nose.

Then he selected a heavy enough river rock, started the engine, and braced the rock on the accelerator. In the driver's seat, Stan angled the steering wheel before climbing out. He leaned in to move the shifter from "Park" to "Drive" and leaped away.

It was beautiful, for a warped value of beauty. The car leaped forward, heading downhill and gaining speed. By the time it lurched over the edge of a steep drop, it was going at least thirty. The car spun completely on its lengthwise axis and plunged to the rocks with a satisfying crash.

Stan scrambled down the bank. He could easily reach the wreck. He had brought a bundle, which he now spread out. Most of it was one of the garish sport jackets he'd been seen in on TV and around the area. It was ripped and bloodied (Stan had deliberately spilled some of his own—not that much, but a little blood looks like more than it is). He deliberately dropped a wallet near the jacket—it held no money, and the soft-leather divider in the cash pocket was ripped, as if someone had been hunting a hidden compartment. A few things in the wallet remained undisturbed, like Stan's Idaho driver's license and copies of some family photos.

The Valiant's trunk had sprung open, and a one-gallon can of gasoline had spilled—just as Stan had hoped. He took a book of paper matches from his pocket, struck one, then lit all the others and tossed the book into the trunk. Flames erupted with a loud _whoosh_.

Now it was time to make his getaway. He scrambled back up to the shoulder of the county road, where in the flickering light of the burning car he shrugged into his backpack, slapped on a fake beard, and set off on a one-hour hike.

In Eugene he stopped at a pay phone and placed an anonymous call to the sheriff's office. "Hi," he said in a disguised voice. "Listen this is Mergrym Kzochiskwtz. I was driving along county route 618, toward Eugene, when I saw an explosion behind me. I think maybe somebody's had a wreck off somewhere on the bank of the Flintrock River. Somebody ought to check it out." And he hung up even before the call could be traced.

A wee-hours breakfast in a truck stop led to an acquaintance with a truck driver, who for twenty dollars was pleased to give the hiker a lift to Portland. In Portland he caught a bus to Bend. Another twenty bucks to the bus driver got him an unannounced stop near the one road into Gravity Falls. Two more miles of walking brought him to the split cliffs where the old trestle ran, and an hour and a half later, Stan was home in the Hut.

And a couple of days later, a western Oregon newspaper, the _Community Watch,_ published a headlined story: STAN PINES DEAD.

Stan made sure that a copy of it got to a guy who gave it to a guy who worked for a guy who managed a casino in Vegas. That guy knew guys who worked for a guy named Rico in San Diego.

Before New Year's, Stan heard through Pinkie Pinter that word was out—Stanley Pines had been whacked not by Rico's boys, but by some other mooks.

Not long after that, a follow-up call from Vinnie told Stan that Pinter confirmed Rico had called off the search for the supposedly deceased Stanley Pines.

And in the first week of the New Year, Stanford Pines received a long-distance call from New Jersey.

It was Filbrick Pines, the twins' father. "Stanford," he said, his voice sounding terribly weak. "I don't know if you heard, but your brother died in a car wreck."

Carefully, Stan imitated Stanford's voice: "Yes, it was in the newspapers," he said. "I've asked the authorities to give me any updates."

"He buried?" Filbrick asked.

"No, Dad. There was a fire. He was burned, I'm afraid."

"Ah, well." A long, unbroken silence followed until at last Filbrick said, "I shouldn't've booted him out that time. I can be such a hothead. I wish I could'a told him that."

Stan clenched his jaw, took a deep breath, and said, "I ran into him a couple of years ago, Dad. He told me he'd forgiven you. I thought he was going to call."

"He never did," his father said heavily. "That's good to hear, though."

Filbrick wasn't a garrulous man—after a short conversation, how are you doing, not bad, Dad, how are you and Mom, you know, same old same old, well, that's all I had to say—they both hung up.

Stan folded the newspaper and put it in a box with other papers. "So long, Stanley Pines," he said gruffly. "You were kind of a jerk, but it was nice knowing you."

And Stanford Pines stowed the box in his bedroom safe, and it was 1983, and a new year had begun a new life for him.

* * *


	7. There Will Be Growth in the Spring

**Welcome to the Murder Hut**

_(Winter-spring 1983)_

* * *

**7-There Will Be Growth in the Spring**

In the first days of 1983 Stan threw himself into his repair work. Up at seven, breakfast (coffee and a pastry), down the secret stairs, take out a component board—there were 548 of them in all, each with its assortment of transistors, capacitors, and things that even the owners of electronics stores could not identify.

Take the component board over to the work bench, turn on the lights, carefully examine each wire, each connection, each part. Test all the electronics. Remove the dead ones. If you have equivalent replacements, install them, make sure they're correctly placed, move on to the next. Twelve hours at the bench, get up, stretch out the kinks, write down on a pad where you left off, make a sketch to be sure. Turn off the work lights, go upstairs.

If it's not freezing cold, if the roads aren't slick with snow and ice, drive into town for dinner. Alone. Then drive back to the Hut, go inside, flop in front of the TV, watch TV for maybe an hour, then around ten PM trudge upstairs—he had stopped sleeping in Ford's bedroom altogether and was thinking of just nailing the door shut until Ford's return—and drop into bed. Alone.

Sleep until seven and then start again. In a good week, he might finish one component board. If it tested out with the meters, then re-install it and hope for the best. If anything glitched, start at the beginning and test everything until you find the mistake.

In the depths of February, the Hut remained constantly cold. At first Stan usually didn't bother with the fireplace or the wood heater for the main house, because the basement lab had electric heat. Then one morning he turned the faucet and nothing happened. He didn't know any plumbers, so he called Manly Dan to ask if he could recommend someone. Dan hauled around in his four-wheel-drive truck, came in, and said, "Too cold in here. Your pipes are froze up. You gotta keep it warmer."

It was too cold for Dan to do any logging, so he hung around while Stan fired up the heater and the fireplace, both at the same time. "Have a seat," Stan told Dan. "Put your feet up. Too early for a beer?"

"Beer can't tell time," Dan said.

So as the place thawed out, they sat and shot the breeze. They went out for lunch at Greasy's, taking Dan's truck. "How the heck do ya drive in this?" Stan asked as they hit patches of black ice and skidded a little now and then. "My El Diablo is all over the road."

"You gotta get yourself a set of snow tires," Dan advised. "You change out your regular tires for snow tires in November, keep the snow tires on until April, then regular tires again."

That day the special at Greasy's was beef stew. They each had two helpings. Then, burping, Dan drove them back to the Hut. By then the Hut felt toasty, and the water began to run, though the faucet coughed out some chunks of ice. "Now in case a pipe busted, we gotta check for leaks," Dan said.

Luckily, there were no leaks.

Dan checked the stack of firewood. "You oughta be good for a month," he said. "I'll drop off a cord in a couple weeks. I'm lousy with firewood right now. Thanks for the beer, Doc."

"Any time," Stan said.

Dan started for the door, stopped, and then turned back. "Didn't you use to have six fingers on each hand? I remember from when I was building the house."

"I had an operation," Stan said.

"Oh. I wasn't sure. I was only, what, twelve when I built the house?"

"You were?" Stan asked, surprised.

"Yeah, Corduroys grow up fast. See you in a couple weeks, Doc, with some fresh firewood."

"Any time," Stan said.

The next day it was hard for him to get down to work on the Portal.

He just hadn't realized how lonely the place was until he had someone to talk to.

* * *

February slipped into March. Stan lost track of days and dates. Toward the middle of the month, everything warmed up, though in Greasy's the guys told him this was just the false spring. One evening Pa Duskerton asked him, "What's gonna be new at the Murder Hut this year?"

"Still thinkin' about that," Stan said. "But there's gonna be changes."

"Ma and I can't wait. When are you opening?"

"I was thinking April first."

"Oh," Ma Duskerton said. "Just two weeks!"

Stan's grin felt frozen. Was it just two weeks? "Yeah," he said.

"You must be keeping real busy," Pa said. "The guys have been missing you at the lodge meetings."

"Yeah, I gotta get snow tires," Stan said. "I didn't know how hard driving up here would be."

"My stars, you have to have snow tires!" Ma said.

"Yeah, I'll be getting some before fall."

That conversation put a stop to his work in the lab. The Hut needed stuff done—paint here and there, a good cleaning, stocking the shelves, ordering fresh candy for the vending machine and the check-out counter, ordering new ice-cream treats for the freezer, trying to think up new freakish exhibits.

Back in the fall, he had bought out a defunct taxidermist's shop's old stock. Now, using skills he had honed at the electronics bench down in the lab, he repurposed the stuffed creatures. For example, he combined the head of a trout with the body of an armadillo and glued the whole thing to the back of a moth-eaten fox. And he topped off the fish head with a small top hat. Voila! The mysterious night-riding troutadillo! A mounted bear's head could be augmented with a plastic replica of a narwhal's tusk to produce the dreaded grizzlycorn!

Dan's cousin had come through with a faked-up pterodactyl, fashioned from leather, snakeskin, fish skin, and carved balsa wood, cunningly painted. Now it had its own niche, with a background of blurry Polaroids of the robotic flying thing that, some said, had been invented by the eccentric McGucket.

A week before his planned opening, Stan sat down at the kitchen table with a second-hand portable typewriter to work up an ad—he had to get it in that same day to make the _Gossiper's_ deadline.

He was a two-finger typist, so he scribbled drafts with a pencil. Mr. Mystery, that was the thing. He'd decided to be Mr. Mystery, and that's what he would be. "Mr. Mystery Announces the Seasonal Opening of the Murder—"

No, he'd meant to change the name of the place. Make it more family friendly. Stan thought and then tried out "Mystery Hut!" Yeah, that chimed with Mr. Mystery, but something wasn't quite right about it.

Mystery House. Mystery Mansion. Hah, nobody'd mistake this shack for a mansion! Mystery Hovel. Too downbeat. Mystery Cottage. Mystery Castle. Mystery Palace. Nope, way over the top.

Stan took out the photos he'd taken of the Murder Hut with its yellow rooftop sign. He tried to envision a different name on the sign. Mystery Museum. Mystery Center. Mystery Log House.

"Geeze," he muttered. "It's hard to come up with a strong word for this shack."

He doodled MYSTERY SHACK. What's a good word for shack? Who could he ask?

Then he thought of his big brother, Shermie. Hey, he was living in Oakland, last Stan heard. He picked up the phone and called Information.

The operator found there was a Sherman F. Pines living in Oakland, and also the Sherman F. Pines Electronics headquarters was located there.

It was four PM on a weekday. Stan called the business number. Got a secretary. Asked her if he could speak to the boss and identified himself as family.

After about five minutes, he got connected. A high-pitched voice said, "Hello, Pines speaking."

Stan started to bellow out a greeting, and then remembered who he was supposed to be. "Sherman!" he said. "This is your brother, Stanford."

"Uncle Stanford! Uh, hi, this is Alex, your nephew."

Oh, so that was why he sounded like a little kid. "Hey, is your old man around?"

"Yes, he's in a meeting? Uh, I came in to work with him today because there's no school? Uh, I'll tell him to call you back if you want."

"Yeah, give him my number. Ready?" Stan told the kid the number and had him read it back. "That's right. I'm just checking in, so—"

"Here he is! Wait, don't hang up. Dad! It's Uncle Stanford!"

A voice older than Stan expected replaced Alex's. "Stanford? I haven't heard from you in more than a year. How are you?"

 _Do the impression,_ Stan told himself. "Actually, I'm doing well. I hope you're the same, Sherman."

"Pretty well thank you." Off-mike, Shermie said, "Alex, go see if Doris has left for the day, OK?" And then, speaking back into the receiver: "I suppose you heard about Stanley."

"Yes, unfortunate," Stan said. "Dad called, but the authorities had already told me. I was sorry to learn of his passing."

"He messed with some bad people, I hear." Shermie sighed. "Rest in peace. What do you need, Stanford?"

Stan was thinking fast. Those components that nobody carried. "I'm interested in duplicating some damaged esoteric electronics. If I sent you samples, do you think you might be able to analyze them and perhaps have them imitated?"

"My engineers can give it a try. Do you have the address of my corporate headquarters?"

"No, I'll need that." Shermie gave it to him, and he wrote it down. "Thank you. I'll be in touch." He heard Alex, Shermie's son, saying something in the background.

Shermie said, "Thanks, son. That was all I wanted to know."

"Hey, Shermie," Stanford said, "could I say goodbye to my nephew?"

"Hi, Uncle Stanford," Alex said.

"Listen, I have a question for you," Stan told him. "Here are three names for a tourist attraction: Mystery House. Mystery Palace. Mystery Shack. Which one would you want to visit?"

"Mystery Shack!" Alex said immediately. "It sounds cool!"

"Thanks, kid. That helps a lot. Goodbye, now."

"Call us again, OK?"

"Sure thing, Alex," Stanley said. "So long for now."

They hung up.

Stanley pulled a pad of small yellow sticky notes over and wrote MYSTERY on one and SHACK on another. He trimmed them and pasted them onto the photo of the Murder Hut, covering the rooftop sign.

Then, not bothering with a rough draft, he rolled a piece of paper into the typewriter and began to tap away:

* * *

**MURDER HUT CHANGES TO MYSTERY SHACK**

Gravity Falls' greatest tourist attraction, the Murder Hut, will re-open for the season on Friday at 9 AM under a new name. Stanford Pines, the owner and operator, says, "We're becoming the Mystery Shack, a family-friendly attraction that aims to please visitors of all ages."

Dr. Pines, a noted researcher into the world of the strange and weird, will be Mr. Mystery, welcoming all comers to mystifying, befuddling, and intriguing new exhibits. "The world is a strange place," he says. "The Mystery Shack will introduce you to stranger things than you've ever dreamed of!"

Amusing, laughable, mysterious, maybe even a little spooky, the Mystery Shack is sure to be a hit. Prices will remain the same . . ..

* * *

Stan finished typing the release and rolled it out of the machine. He read through it, using his pencil to correct two typos. Then with a sheet of yellow poster board and red and black markers he made a new temporary sign and tacked it up by the front door. He phoned the newspaper office and asked them to send young Toby over with a camera.

When the kid came riding up half an hour later, Stan had dressed in his suit and fez. "I got a news release for you," he said. "Well, really an ad, but it's written like a news story. I want you to take a couple photos to go with it. There's five bucks in it for you, OK?"

"Sure thing!" Toby said eagerly.

They went on the front porch, where Stan posed with his eight-ball cane pointing to the temporary sign, and Toby snapped half a dozen shots. "There you go," Stan said, handing Toby five dollars and an envelope with the news release. "Tell your folks to pick out the best-looking picture and run the ad on Monday. Quarter page. They can bill me for it."

* * *

By the time on Monday when he got a copy of the _Gossiper,_ Stan had already taken down the Murder Hut sign and had painted MYSTERY on a new one. Dan Corduroy was using a jigsaw to cut out the letters SHACK to go on a second, lower roof sign beneath MYSTERY. He would help Stan mount them, too, for twenty extra dollars.

Stan called the big lumberjack over. "What do you think?" he asked, showing the big ad.

"Mystery Shack," Dan said. "Oh. That's how come the sign. Mystery Shack." He scratched his beard and then his head. "Mystery Shack. Instead of Murder Hut." He clapped Stan on the back. "I like it!"

Stan picked himself up from the ground. "Then Mystery Shack it is! I got a feeling this place is gonna be a gold mine."

Oh, yeah.

Mr. Mystery, master of the Mystery Shack!

It was all coming together.

World, meet the Mystery Shack!

* * *

_The End_


End file.
